Agent 99 gets tough in ‘Get Smart’

Female Star of the Year: Anne Hathaway

She got to wear great clothes and be the kick-ass funny girl on the set. So what more could a girl want?

For Anne Hathaway, Agent 99, the making of “Get Smart” was like a day at summer camp. “It was similar to ‘The Princess Diaries,’ which felt like just a bunch of kids getting together every day to put on a show,” she says. ” ‘Get Smart’ was four months of that.”

The very guy-centric ‘Get Smart’ crew, that boys club, did their very best to understand the simple needs of their female star but occasionally fell short.

“Sometimes I would come into work and there would be things that I would just need as a girl, like an exercise barre, that they would have no clue about,” says the actress. “Like hair. I don’t think guys understand hair as well as girls. For example, in the first ad for the film it looked like I had great big dreadlocks shooting out of my head. Like octopus tentacles. They were obviously photoshopped in. I had to explain that girls like hair to be soft and move. It’s not rocket science.”

And when it wasn’t about her hair, it was about her breasts.

Scene: Steve Carell, as Maxwell Smart, and Agent 99 infiltrate a party. 99 is dancing with the Bad Guy. Max tries to get her attention. They rendezvous in the coat closet. “There was a really funny joke in the script, but we weren’t really sure how to end the scene,” Hathaway says. “So Steve would come up with these lines basically just insulting Agent 99. He started to talk about how I used my sex appeal to get what I wanted. He would graphically describe the ways that I would use my breasts to gather intel. He would take off into these really vaguely insulting places but he would always bring it back with the line ‘I’m not judging. I just noticed.'”